


rosy path

by enterprisecaptainoikawa



Category: Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Canon Trans Character, Gen, M/M, Nonbinary Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 20:38:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11928819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enterprisecaptainoikawa/pseuds/enterprisecaptainoikawa
Summary: “So I think this is some kind of alternate dimension,” they tell Mary.





	rosy path

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K80NkcHRoqY)

_one of two_

Red v-neck. Graying hair they've been too busy to bother dealing with; it just kind of spikes off in different directions and lazily falls in their eyes and curls down across their forehead in a big old mess. Leather jacket. Facial hair. They’re looking fine, and if they don’t, well, they could give less of a shit; the bar lighting is dim; Mary could give less of a shit. Robert is artfully classless, and perfectly content.

They head out the door with two knives, one in each pocket. The second, they just like to fiddle with.

-

They’re a little too drunk to think about things, to properly describe the place, but Jim and Kim’s doesn’t change much, anyway; it’s not so different from any other place, really. Robert tilts their head back and eyes the colored holiday lights that line the back wall, artfully stapled above a lit-up sign that just reads, _BEER._ They love that. It all has them just wanting to—run out to the store and buy some shitty lights, nail them up by moonlight and half-drunk, just to see these things dangling from the edges of their roof, just because it might piss off Joseph or some other neighbor. Just because it might make Mary laugh.

Dames might think it was pretty, too. Would probably die before nailing up some tacky holiday lights on his own precious house, though. Robert can’t blame him, they suppose. Some things are just kind of sacred.

“I think we’re kind of dating,” they tell Mary a while into their night, with these red-yellow-green-blue lights reflected in their eyes—probably looking very cryptid-like. They think they can dig that. They can definitely dig that.

Mary’s grin has always been a ghostly kind of thing. “Good,” she says, simple. She takes a swig from her glass. “Good,” she says. And Robert is inclined to agree. For the most part.

They’re probably not good enough for Damien, and definitely not clean enough, or simple enough—their pronouns feel cowardly, in that sense, as if they just couldn’t decide between the two options given them and just said _fuck it_ , and continued doing the same damn things they’d always done, with the same damn name, not changing hardly a thing about themselves except for the pronouns. They’d get misgendered less, probably, if they tried a little, looked a little different. But they’re lazy. And they don’t really want to change anything else. Just the little noun replacers that had always bothered them as a kid.

Dames gets it; he says he does, and Robert appreciates it; they’re just irrationally, and probably stupidly, uncertain of it. They don’t know what to do. They throw back another shot.

“I just really like him,” they tell Mary. They get sick of the damned lights and stare at the empty glass in their fingers instead. “I really oughta let him know, honestly. ‘Cause he’s so good.”

Damien’s just too good.

-

 _This is a bad idea,_ Robert thinks, and then knocks on the door, and the discrepancy between common sense and their calloused hand pulling on the knocker makes them laugh, although it probably shouldn’t. They wonder if they look alright. It’s irrelevant, a dumb thought, probably. But shit happens.

The door swings open with a stretching creak and Damien looks tired, is swaying on his feet, but he’s nothing if not polite, if not confused. He asks if Robert wants to come inside. His long hair looks so damned pretty, dark and mussed from sleep, running in tangles down past his shoulders. And Robert feels a little bad, because it’s probably some horrid hour of night falling into morning; they didn’t check, they’re not sure. And here they are, waking up their pseudo-lover in the dead of night.

“I’m a bastard for waking you up,” they mumble—conversational, almost—as they follow Damien into the kitchen. Sleepiness is dragging at Damien’s features as if it had fishhooks sunk into them, but he smiles faintly, and it’s damned beautiful.

“Maybe just a little,” he concedes, and Robert smirks.

“I just had to tell you,” they say, stumbling a bit, “I just wanted you to know, that. I think you’re pretty, uh…” They can’t remember what the word was. It was a good one, though. “You’re pretty pretty. You’re pretty sick, Dames,” they say, reaching for the first word that comes, and grab his hand. Damien rolls his eyes, but he’s still smiling, which is probably a good sign. Robert can only hope.

“I wish you’d write poems,” Damien says, eyes all dark and twinkling in this old Victorian-styled hallway, and Robert almost believes him.

“I’d write everything about you,” they say, leering, and Damien blushes, and it’s so pretty. And then Robert trips and breaks the damned vase.

It was the hallway rug, they think, they tripped over the thing and its senseless tassels; it’s the rug’s fault, and the vase is in pieces, that authentic Victorian thing that Damien is always showing everybody who visits the house, and Robert’s drunk, and it hits them suddenly, that they broke the damned vase, and Christ, they feel terrible, and Damien—Damien isn’t saying anything but his lower lip is quivering a little, and Christ, Robert feels bad, Robert feels so bad; they reach out but Damien shrinks back as if by instinct, and he looks like a withering flower folding into death before Robert’s very eyes.

“You, uh… have any duct tape?” they try. “Maybe some superglue?” But Damien is quiet. And something in Robert turns in the wrong direction, they think, maybe because they’re out of it, kind of off as a result of the shots, or maybe just because they’ve always made shit decisions and they dislike themselves for it and don’t want to put forth the effort of changing for the better. It’s easier, this way, if not more unpleasant.

“We’ll put it back together tomorrow; the thing’ll be fine,” they say. “Artistic. _Nouveau._ It’ll look even better than it did in the first place.” They give Damien a messy smack on his cheek. He doesn’t move. They try to make up for it by forcing it and it’s bad, it’s horrible, they know, but they do it anyway, try to pull Dames into them, but Dames isn’t having it. He’s just kind of frozen, standing there in the hall. And Robert starts to feel a little tired, too.

They lean into Damien’s space again, and Damien steps back, and they frown, annoyed. This whole interaction between the two of them is familiar to Robert; god knows they’ve experienced this kind of fracturing before. They might as well just break whatever isn’t broken, right? They’re honestly not sure what else a person would do.

“Whatever,” they say, and wander off, and they see it in the corner of their eye, Damien hesitating to move, wanting to follow after them and make sure they get home safe, but tired, too, and distant, and maybe even afraid.

It’s whatever. The vase is broken. Maybe the relationship is, too. Robert stumbles home. Home is very dark.

-

They drift.

-

They wake up in a bar, which is weird, because they do have this faint recollection of getting into bed, angrily shucking off their boots and jacket, and one of the boots hitting the wall with a loud thud. And they’d lay on top of their comforter for a while after that, narrowing their eyes at the ceiling and just feeling upset, just feeling the anger roll throughout their body. They’d fallen asleep exhausted in the mental sense and the physical one.

There’s a man poking their shoulder, though, and telling them they need to leave. Robert looks up, blinking. They’re… sitting on a stool… cheek pressed against the counter, which is littered with empty glasses and a detritus of broken peanut shells.

And Ned looks different.

Robert blinks some more. Ned the bartender— _Ned the bartender?_ —looks like he got barfed on by Damien’s closet; he’s dolled up in a vest and a prim white shirt and a hat, and tied his collar with a damned linen bow, to boot. And he has a mustache. This is how Robert realizes they’re dreaming—that mustache wasn’t on Ned’s upper lip some hours ago. They swear it wasn’t.

They pinch themselves once, then twice, all the requisite sensations, but nothing happens. Everything, Robert starts to realize with developing anxiety, is beginning to feel awfully real here. And oddly so. They feel like Alice, looking around the bar they’ve evidently wandered into at some unremembered point or another— _Wonderland?_ —at bashed-up but intricately carved wood cabinets, and a tiled floor, and gas lights hanging from the ceiling, and grime—the people seem familiar, if anything. But the furniture is positively foreign.

Robert’s not sure what to do but bullshit their way through whatever fresh hell they’ve found themselves in now—dream or not. So they give Ned a knowing smirk.

“Of course, of course. ‘m just packing up now, old friend,” they say kindly, very showy, and even politely push the stool under the counter before they wander towards the door. The others leaving are dressed really kind of funny, too, and Robert feels, they think, like they were just dropped into Damien’s Victorian England, or something.

Then the crowd pushes them out without ceremony into the early hours of the morning, outside, the street, and Robert realizes that that is exactly what this is.

They start to laugh, a freaked kind of sound, taking it all in. They feel like they’re reading the first page of a Sherlock Holmes story, or some other beloved book of Damien’s, all the requisite features present—the London fog, the bustle even in the early hours of the morning, the clothing, the lights, the factory smoke, the clip-clop of horses driving people down the street—Robert laughs, their eyes wide, and thinks, _alright. This is clearly… some fucked up, cryptid-type, paranormal… fantasy. Or something._ An alcohol-and-sadness-prompted dream. Or something even messier.

So, it’s fucking… 1895, or something. Uh. Cool. Or something. They can roll with this. (Can they? Who the fuck knows? They’ll just have to bullshit their way back to normalcy.)

They spot Mary in the crowd then! and nearly wither sighing in relief, and shout, running to catch up with the smart pace she’s making down the cobblestone street.

At the sound of her name, she turns, and damned if it isn’t a spectacular reveal, this woman spinning around in place in a dress that doesn’t look it’d let her do _anything_ , the same old cross necklace hung around her neck, her hair just a little different, pinned up all prim. Other women around wear wide-brimmed hats with all manner of flowers sewed on, but Mary’s just got the pins and her requisite smirk for a decoration and it’s all she really needs.

“Do I know you, love?” she asks, curious, pausing, and Robert grins, and feels a tad less alone.

“Maybe not. Would you like to?” they return, and offer their arm, because it seems like the Victorian thing to do—it’s probably a habit inadvertently stolen from Dames.

 _Dames._ Is he… what all of this is? What it’s for? Robert… will think about that in a moment. Or five.

Mary, anyway, doesn’t recognize them, either. _So that’s how this is gonna go,_ Robert thinks. They shrug, and while two of them wander down this smoky London street in what seems like no particular direction, Robert tries to explain.

“So I think this is some kind of alternate dimension,” they tell Mary. For her part, Mary doesn’t look the slightest bit taken aback; she just nods, listening. She always was pretty cool like that. “I mean, I guess you could say that every dimension is an alternate one,” they consider, reasoning it all out, “including mine. I’m just. In the wrong one, somehow. Woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I guess,” they say slyly, and the sentiment makes them laugh in spite of their situation, and Mary, naturally, is unimpressed as she always is with their parental jokes. By now, they’re used to it.

“So you’re trying to get back home,” she says.

“Reckon so.” They’re pretty sure they wouldn’t last a day in Damien’s England, outdoor survival skills or not; they’d probably manage to get themselves hung by sunset for one reason or another. It’s not much of a question—it just seems like the thing to do. Go home. From here, Robert realizes, the events of their yesterday seem very far off, and it’s easier to look at all the broken pieces from a distance. The thing to do, the goal, it seems like, is to reach home. And patch things up with Dames, or something.

They feel a another little twinge inside, something like that, remembering him.

“You don’t know a… Damien, by chance? Bloodmarch?” they ask slowly, and wish they had a knife on them. Things, they decide, are just so much easier to get done when you’ve got a knife on you. Kind of like a comfort blanket.

“Damien.” Mary throws the name around like Robert likes to throw their knife between their palms. They almost want to take the name back before she breaks it. It's… precious, to them.

Mary has that look on her face, like there are scandals flashing before her eyes in all their bloody gory. “You mean… Prince Damien?” She raises a interested brow. Sips metaphorical wine, in all the ease of her stance.

And Robert does as close to a spit take as one can do without the presence of actual liquid. “He’s a fuckin’ _prince?_ Shit,” they say, struck. “I—well. Well, I’ll be damned.” And they pause. “Are you shittin’ me?”

Mary rolls her eyes. “Of course I am.”

And this is how Robert realizes that, alternative universe or not, the people are the same. Damien owns and manages a bookstore down the street.

-

After Mary shows them Damien’s shop, Robert settles on the front step of the place, which might be the most well-swept area in a couple square miles, and sits there until the sun comes up again. They spend the hours people-watching, comparing the images to those of movies they’ve seen about the era. They wonder if anyone famous passes by, if Oscar Wilde or some poet has just swept themselves across the street and disappeared around the corner right before Robert’s lidded eyes. They watch, at one point, a musician that might be Mat making his way through a crowd of older people. Robert fades in and out of it, half-asleep but not, really. Not really.

They must be a little more asleep than awake later, anyway, because it takes them several moments to collect themselves when the fucking cop kicks them alert in the damned leg.

They open one eye, feeling not unlike a woken dragon, fire ready in their mouth. The policeman doesn’t look nearly as impressed as he should.

“You can’t be here,” he says, and _hell,_ Robert thinks, _you can’t be anywhere in this damned place._

They take a deep breath and swallow their irritation, take a different approach via painting a pretty smile on their chapped lips. They probably look hideous, but, who knows. Maybe some people would find it charming.

“It’s fine, Officer,” they say coaxingly, holding up a hand. “I‘m just waiting for a friend. He owns this place, y’ see?”

The cop looks awfully unaffected. “You want to get out of here?” Robert tries.

Either their leering is too affected by their utter sleeplessness, or the man simply isn’t interested. Probably the former.

“On your feet,” the man orders, and Robert willingly obliges and then keeps going—starts running down the street— _it’s much too early in the morning for this kind of exercise,_ they think—when they look back, the London policeman’s right on their tails, and Robert swears for what must be the fiftieth time in the last few hours. It’s the kind of moment where films start, they consider wryly—the chase, the voice over, “I’ll bet you’re wondering how I ended up in this tight spot!” and all that. And maybe that’s it, they think—they’re in some kind of film—and then they bowl over Damien Bloodmarch just like they did his fucking vase not a few hours prior.

“Funny, I was thinking historical drama, not rom-com,” they mutter, on top of this damned man, the only here who looks the same as he always does—the ruffled shirt, the vest with gold buttons, the cloak, the ascot. He’s got his hair pinned up, though, and Robert stares, because _Christ, it looks stunning._ They feel a stab of guilt in their gut remembering the events that have led up to whatever on earth today is feigning to be. It’s the hair, they think desperately, _shook,_ and have to physically resist the urge to wrap their fingers in it and muss it up to all hell.

Damien looks startled, _confused,_ but not uninterested, gazing up at Robert. “Excuse me?” he asks, and Robert laughs.

“This is just—very… nevermind,” they say, shaking their head, and get to their feet. They hold out a hand for Damien, and he takes it, fingers so pale and soft and smooth and pretty, Robert cringes just a little. They help Dames to his feet, and then—the two of them are standing here, and person after person is brushing past them, all on their way to god knows where, kicking up dust, and Robert’s not sure what on earth they’re supposed to do. Explain themselves? Fix things between the two of them? They haven’t the faintest idea how.

Robert sighs.

 

_two of two_

“Before you start,” says Robert, “it’s, uh, they. Not he. Just so you don’t go… narrating it all wrong in your internal monologue, and all.” They avoid Damien’s eyes saying this, playing with the ends of their sleeves like they’re used to something else but have lost it—but Damien thinks he gets Robert’s meaning more than they would probably think. He’s confused about a lot of things—befuddled as to the manner in which not a few moments prior he had been dislocated from under the harsh boot of London reality to under this scruffy, rugged _Robert—_ bewildered by how quickly a day could change from one thing into another—flummoxed by this person’s rather American-tinted vernacular—and it all leaves him stumped, unsure of himself and his footing in the great wall of the universe. But he’s not confused about the pronouns. What kind of academic would he be, if he couldn’t understand? Not to mention, he’s already changed his own more than once.

He waves off the police officer, at any rate, tells him everything is fine, and the man doesn’t look too happy about this, funnily enough, but that’s just how things go sometimes, Damien supposes. He looks back to Robert, as they’ve introduced themselves in the moment previous—Robert, all wrapped up in a long gray jacket both buttoned wrong and frayed, white collar popped, tie askew—Robert, uncombed, unshaven, with the prettiest eyes Damien’s ever witnessed. He thinks, or maybe just imagines, he’s seen them before, if only just in passing, through the store window, perhaps. And then again, wouldn’t he remember someone as memorable as this?

 _Before you start,_ Robert had said, but Damien hasn’t the faintest as to what he is meant to begin.

His manners speak for him in the absence of vocalized thought. It’s 1895, after all. “Come in, come in,” he says, pulling Robert’s hand—he’s still holding it, he notes, even as he tugs it—as he makes for his shop, unlocking the door with spare fingers and a key. “Did you want tea? Coffee?”

“Scotch?”

Damien grins, and it’s instinctive, hiding the expression behind a careful hand, but Robert is already smiling in return—he’s too late. “It’s hardly eight, you know.”

They give him a dry look. “And?” they ask, tilting their head. And Damien can hardly help but stare.

Robert hops up onto the counter, looking around. Damien feels a little bare watching their eyes trip around the little shop—it’s nothing big; he really does most of the work and leaves the rest to his son, still asleep on the second floor, up the stairs—it’s nothing much, but he treats it like a temple—except “temple” doesn’t work, on second thought. Not nearly as well as “home.”

Robert whistles. The sound feels small in the grand scheme of things, but damned if it doesn’t entirely fill up Damien’s insides.

“I don’t know what to say,” Robert says at last, post a few more moments of embarrassed silence, likely on both their parts. “Haven’t got a clue.”

Robert is a stranger, but they feel legitimate, somehow. Damien shrugs. “Then stay a while,” he says. Before he sets to work for the day, he passes Robert the flask from his coat.

-

“There’s a vagrant sitting on your beloved counter,” Lucien tells his father later, post at last waking from slumber, pulling on what was evidently the first number of articles his fingers found after clawing his way out of bed, post brooding down the spiralling stairway into the store, a smoking pipe in hand that Damien plucks from his fingers and drawers away without a moment’s hesitation. “The one _no one’s_ allowed to sit on,” Lucien reminds his father, recalling a past incident, and here Damien is again, smiling to himself—Robert must be special, indeed.

Lucien looks as startled at the upward curve as Damien feels.

“They’re… “ Damien struggles to find the proper word. “They’re alright,” he says finally, tilting his head. As the two of them are observing, the stranger on the counter takes a long swig from Damien’s flask and sighs, leans back and knocks over a pile of moderately expensive novels. They don’t seem to notice having committed an act that could surely be referred to as treason, in some circles. They’re simply making eyes at the ceiling and its, admittedly lovely, intricate wood moldings.

“Alright, Father,” Lucien echoes, raising an eyebrow, and leaves Damien to pick up the books. After that, the bell at the top of the shop door rings as the thing swings open, and a customer walks in, coins jingling, and steals away Damien’s immediate attention. Robert doesn’t leave.

-

It's not as if there was ever one singular moment that, having occurred, altered the course of Damien's identity forever. He thinks of himself as one long musical _crescendo,_ rather—a piece composed of small notes, events, that over the length of his life had grown from soft to deafening and then to a prideful but moderate peace. He didn't think of himself as a man in one sudden moment, never had some large epiphany as to what it was he needed to become. He just. Kept doing certain things, thinking certain things, feeling certain ways, and denying all these aspects of himself until they all seemed to come together at once, while he was reading a novel that had him deliberating on such thoughts as gender and identity—it all came together as a puzzle does once finally completed, and he thought, _oh, of course._ There was nothing to become. He'd been himself all along.

It was best to move, after Lucien. And what better place to disappear into and then reappear inside of, in the guise of another aesthetic, than London? The rigid binary of fashion helped, in this regard—no one looked twice at a figure in breeches before calling them a man, and doubly so in such a crowd as that of the city. He made it work.

He is forever pausing in front of his bedroom mirror, and the moments turn from pauses to hours spent doubting an alternate self living inside the glass. He fixes his hair one way and another but he can’t bear to cut it. It’s strange; he met a person of similar identity to his own, once, and they had felt the opposite, found the very length of their hair to be proportionate to the distress they so often felt stir their insides. Damien feels the opposite, grown weary of the oft-cited correlation between appearance and sex; his hair is damned pretty, and hell, indeed, if anyone ever pressured him to take a blade to it. _There is more than one way,_ he’d decided at one point, _to be a man._ This is his.

He never told Lucien. Hid it from his son, in all honesty, anxious as to how he might respond—he was less afraid of being reported to the law than he was disappointing his child. In retrospect, it must have been obvious, and he’d underestimated Lucien—one day, his son had walked in on him only halfway dressed, and Damien had been horrified, heart seeming to drop from its holdings within his chest in a tiny percentage of a beat—but his son only looked as half-lidded and unimpressed as ever.

“I—” Damien had started, and he was clutching a shirt to his chest and living in another scene, his sister walking in on him kissing a girl, forever ago, the pop of her mouth falling open, the violent beat of his father’s boots coming up the stairs, the boom of his voice demanding, “What’s going on?” and Damien, wretched corset halfway unlaced, crying—a tear—

Lucien sighed, uncrossed his arms only to wipe the tear from sliding down his father’s pale cheek. “Don’t look so surprised,” he’d said, and seemed stuck between his traditional bad attitude and wanting to do some good. “It’s. It’s, uh, alright. Father. No big secret just revealed.” He patted his father on the shoulder with all the grace of the passersby of London, hitting elbows and brushing dirt-dusted skirts while they wandered in a million directions. Damien was having difficulties remaining in the present moment.

“You think less of me,” he narrated, and Lucien rolled his eyes.

“Some men have different parts, father; it’s no big _quandary_ or something.” And there it was again, his signature pout. “What, did you think you were special?”

It was perhaps not the kindest way of putting it, thinking back on the memory, but it was Lucien, and thus it meant the world.

-

“God, I really do like your hair like that,” Robert says as Damien’s closing up shop, sitting now on the steps leading from the store up to Damien and Lucien’s living quarters, and paging through a random book without really looking at anything but the pictures. Damien’s hand floats up to feel his hair, a painting of a bun held together by a thousand pins and braided an infinite number of times, all tied up with a single, strained black ribbon. This is an exaggeration—he hadn’t had enough time this morning to fix it flawless; there are pieces out of place, he’s sure, flyaways—he consists, as always, of an imperfect disposition. Robert, still, is gazing upon him with a smile that is both predator and soft, if such a thing is possible with only two lips.

He smiles in return, and sits beside this strange being strewn askew across his steps. What is it about their graying hair that looks so touchable? He resists the urge, of course—it’s only politeness—but, then again—this stranger seems to invite crudeness in with open arms with every shift of their stature. They’re looking at him again. Damien is curious as to what they’re thinking, in addition to the rest of it—all the things he’s been wanting to ask all day and has refrained himself from wording out loud—

“Something about you is familiar.”

Robert laughs. An enigma. “Sounds about right,” they say, and don't explain a thing. Their fingers are twitching again, looking for something to break.

Damien’s hair had taken the larger part of an hour prior to dawn to assemble. Lucien is off wandering the streets, probably with a friend and bothering some hapless elders. And Robert looks so touchable. These three facts present themselves to Damien, inquiring, _and what would your conclusion be?_

“You really should stop me,” Robert tells Damien then. “This is a terrible idea; it’s just the same damned thing again, the same mistake—and I still don’t have a damned clue how to fix the first ten fucking million—”

Evidently, they don’t have the self-control needed to prevent themselves from digging their unwashed fingers into Damien’s hair. Damien thinks of a child on the beach, kicking at painstakingly constructed sandcastles just to see their ornate towers crumble back to dust. He tilts his head one way and kisses Robert on the mouth—he never could help himself, either, when someone yanked on his painstakingly architected hair.

-

The two of them find their way up the staircase, and fall into Damien's bedroom—clothes on, distance, dissipated.  

-

Robert looks like they want to cry. They sit on the edge of Damien’s bed, having withdrawn from their previous position in the prior moment, looking miserable and quivering and falling—from where and _to_ where, Damien doesn’t know. Damn him for putting the two of them here in spite of Robert’s words to the contrary of such a move.

“I’m supposed to fix it,” they mumble vaguely, running fingers through the graying mess coming out of their scalp. “Why else would I be here? That’s how the movies go. I end up here, somehow, and I have some epiphany, and find my way back, some-fucking-how, and I fix it. _Gahh.”_ They groan into their hands. “I’m such a mess, Dames. Just. Shit.” They collapse back onto the bed, a sandcastle knocked flat by its own lack of merit.

Damien, at this point, hasn’t the faintest idea as to who this stranger is, not factually, but he kind of feels as if he does, or should. He’s confused as all hell. Everything makes sense. He has no idea what’s happening. He feels as if he should. He does, and—he doesn’t.

“Come here,” he says to this bizarre stranger, and pulls Robert into himself, wrapping around them his arms and legs. It’s both right and odd at the same time. He kisses the back of Robert’s neck, knowing the contact is of the platonic kind. They’re nothing to each other. They’re friends.

 _“God,”_ says Robert, and they smile in spite of themselves. “Damien,” they say, and then again, “Damien. Damien. Damien.”

The fourth time sparks a train of thought in Damien that is memory, but not at all.

 

_and_

They don’t know how the fuck to describe themselves. They’ve tried on labels like potential new pairs of workboots pulled on at the department store: agender, neutrois, genderqueer, genderless. Nonbinary—maybe. But they’re not really sure of anything.

Maybe, they think, all spooned-up inside of Damien’s long-ass limbs, that’s the whole idea. Maybe, an identity isn’t meant to be, is too large and too complex to ever be summed up in the confines of a single word. Maybe they’re just—a clusterfuck of feelings in a body that could never be perfect. It’s an imperfect condition but, all things considered, not much is composed of the alternative, Robert supposes.

They turn around, pin Damien down on his own sheets. “I’m a mess,” they tell him.

And he shrugs, in answer. “Likewise.” And Robert would argue that, but. Maybe Damien knows himself better than Robert does, and maybe, maybe, messiness isn’t the worst thing in the world, and rather, it’s the human condition, essentially. Some philosophical bullshit like that.

“What’s my epiphany?” they wonder out loud, hovering above this pale, pretty, _Victorian_ man. “What am I taking from all this shit?”

Damien smirks, and _Christ,_ it’s a look on him. Even more so, with his dark hair lying in destroyed, living swirls around his head where Robert had, previously, pulled it apart.

“No one is perfect. You’re not alone. Love conquers all. I am in possession of a severe hair kink.” Robert chokes at the last one; they’d never known this, somehow, all of these probably very obvious facts, the latter being the most immediately notable and entertaining, of course, but the former sentiments are true, too, naturally, probably—coming from Damien’s mouth, they almost don’t sound terribly cliched.

 _Does that work?_ Nothing changes, Robert is still here; Damien is still under them; the room is the same, although the furnishings are hardly any different than they’ve ever been as Robert’s seen them. Across time and space, nothing much is really so different.

“Fuck, I thought. I thought that might work,” they groan. They’re still here.

“You still haven’t found a way to fix it,” Damien reads.

“Preach,” says Robert, and collapses down.

-

Time passes. They fall asleep. They wake up. Damien opens up the store again, he and Lucien spend the day organizing the books and putting away the newly delivered ones on their respective shelves, and Robert wanders around, picking up novel after novel as if one important movement might trigger the opening of a cinematic hidden door. The hours keep ticking. And then it’s days, and weeks, and Lucien goes off to school, and Robert is both happy and miserable; they just want to go home. They go out with Mary. They wander outside and feel the night. They appropriate Damien’s clothes and feel like a doll in a very large collection.

And then—they start talking. They tell Dames everything, and when they’ve finally finished, they shut up and let him speak. And for an even longer period of days, because Damien is a slut for flowery, over-extended language and the long-winded, full explanation, Robert listens. And they think they finally begin to understand their old friend, and it feels— _good._ Right. Correct.

And Damien buys the vase.

Robert realizes as soon as Damien walks in with it, the store bell ringing along with the swinging motion of the door, the thing wrapped up between Damien’s gloves. Robert knows what the thing is before Dames even says anything, recognizes the shape, can feel that it’s time.

“I’m gonna apologize in advance,” they say, and Damien sighs—smiling, but shaking his head. He knows Robert too well, at this point.

They hug Victorian Damien goodbye, whisper something sweet into his ear, and hope to god there’s something good in 1895 for this man to live on for the remainder of his alternate existence. They hug him, and he lets out the smallest of squeaks, surprised, and it’s damned adorable, and he squeezes Robert back, and for the smallest of moments, Robert doesn’t want to go.

But they have their own mess back home. They steel themselves for the action. The vase, having slipped, halfway unwrapped, from Damien’s fingers in his initial surprise, splits to pieces upon contact with the solid floor. And Robert, too, disappears.

-

They march up to Damien’s door. If they sound sure of themselves, it’s only because their boots are so heavy on the sidewalk; they’re nervous as hell. They knock, and they are freaked, they are _so goddamn freaked_ —but it’s fate. Some magical bullshit happens, it means something. Maybe they and Dames won’t work out, but they’re meant to try, if only for the sake of themselves and their self-betterment, or something. Maybe Damien is their first and not their last, and merely one step of many. Val, maybe, is the last. Or someone, some-thing else altogether. They knock. And Damien comes. The door opens up, slow. Damien, understandably, is hesitant, and pissed, and weary.

“Hey,” says Robert, wavering. And it’s some kind of start.

 

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on [twitter](https://twitter.com/unicorn__tommo) or [tumblr](http://enterprisecaptainoikawa.tumblr.com/) to talk about these two to be honest i love them so dearly


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